Build Muscle on a Vegan, Plant Based Bodybuilding Plan

There’s a misconception that you need to eat meat to get big. Although many professional athletes don’t eat meat, people still believe that meat equals muscle mass. I’ve been a no-meat athlete for the past twenty years, and I have not found it difficult to effectively build muscle on a plant-based diet.

The standard American diet is filled with calorie-dense processed foods, but when you eat whole plant foods, you will find that they are lower in calories per bite of food, and you will need to eat more volume to feel full and satisfied. I eat five bananas (about 100 calories each) as soon as I wake up, and that is before my main breakfast, which is a bowl of oats with fruit and nuts. On my way to the gym, I eat another three bananas for a quick burst of energy to optimize my fuel before a workout. After my workout, I look to starchy vegetables, legumes, and grains for the basis of my hearty, muscle-recovery meals. Some of my favorite choices are yams, beans, lentils, and brown rice. Then I add plenty of other nutrition foods such as leafy greens. (Note that leafy greens alone do not have enough calories to satisfy, so don’t build your diet on greens alone.) On days that I exercise, I burn more fuel and thus eat more calories to feed my muscles. My appetite guides my daily nutrition plan.

When you understand how muscle is built, you will realize that animal products are not necessary, and they could actually have an adverse effect on your health. Muscle size only increases when two conditions are present:

Nutrition plays a huge role in whether or not you will build muscle. If you have been spinning your wheels when it comes to muscle gain, it is almost certainly related to your ratio of calories consumed to energy expended, factoring in the type of calories (whole plant foods or processed foods).

A great way to know if you are consuming enough calories is to evaluate your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and your total caloric expenditure. Use a Harris-Benedict calculator to estimate the number of calories you are expending each day, based on your gender, age, height, weight, and (very importantly) activity level. This data will give you a baseline from which to work. I am not suggesting you count calories every day, but it is very helpful to get a sense of whether you burn 2,500 or 3,500 calories per day, based on your individual metrics, and to understand how many calories to consume. If you burn 3,500 calories per day but consume only 2,500, you are unlikely to build muscle and will likely lose weight.

There were times in my life when I tried to build muscle and didn’t put on a single pound, because I didn’t do what was required to succeed. Other times, I put on 20 pounds in a year and completely transformed my levels of strength and muscle mass, because I understood the actions to take and I performed them consistently, putting myself in a position to achieve my goal.